


Stupid Psychic Visions

by DesertScribe



Category: Crazyhead (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Demons, Gen, Gen Fumbling Towards Femslash, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 13:38:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Amy and Raquel go looking for Amy's lost phone and instead find so much more.





	Stupid Psychic Visions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mechanonymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechanonymouse/gifts).



Amy was not having the best of nights. This was the second time in as many hours that she and Raquel had needed to drive out to the abandoned factory, and this time they did not even have the accomplishment of exorcising another demon to look forward to.

On their way back from the night's first visit to the factory, which _had_ involved an exorcism and had gone quite well, thank you very much, Raquel had announced that she wanted a shower before they went anywhere for dinner. Amy had fallen asleep on Raquel's bed while waiting for her, at which point she had been struck by the now recognizable feeling of an all too real dream which she immediately knew would come true. In the dream, she heard Raquel say, "have you found your phone yet?" as they searched through familiar open spaces half exposed to the elements, and between rusting hulks of abandoned equipment, and down long hallways.

Amy's only consolation was that for once the vision did not seem to be showing anyone in danger. Even that was of little comfort when she woke up, checked her pockets, and discovered that her phone was nowhere to be found. Her phone already being gone meant that she had just had a vision of something that was going to happen that same night and not in some unknown distant future, unless she was going to start losing her phone on a regular basis, which would suck big time.

Dinner needed to wait, and they needed to go back to the factory, which brought them to their present activity of reenacting Amy's dream in the most boring way possible.

"Stupid seer powers," Amy muttered under her breath as she scanned the ground around her by the too dim beam of her electric torch. There were a lot of empty cans, broken bottles, and other bits of rubbish lying around, but the object of her search remained elusive. "What good is a psychic vision of hunting for a lost phone if it can't be used to prevent losing the phone in the first place due to the phone already being gone by the time the vision happens? It's just one big 'I told you so' from the great beyond." She kicked one of the cans, sending it flying off into the darkness to clatter against an unseen wall, but the action did not feel nearly as cathartic as she had hoped it would.

"Woah, watch it there!" Raquel scolded from somewhere behind Amy, where she too was attempting to find Amy's lost phone by the light of a torch which, just like Amy's, was probably going to need new batteries if they kept at this for much longer.

"What are you talking about?"

"You almost hit me with that thing!"

Amy frowned and turned around to face Raquel. "No, I didn't," she said. "I kicked it in pretty much the exact opposite direction from you." She pointed the torch in the direction the can had gone. "I mean, you heard where it landed, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but I felt something go right past my head, too. What else could it have been?"

"I don't know. Maybe a bat?"

"Are there bats around here?" Raquel turned the beam of her torch to shine around the exposed steel rafters above them, but if there were any bats around then they elected not to announce their presence. "I can never decide if I like bats or not," Raquel continued when neither Amy not any hypothetical bats answered her question. "On the one hand, they usually look cute in pictures. But on the other hand, I have a hard time trusting anything that flutters around, looking like a little magic flying chamois cloth, yet never helps wash the car."

"I think I'd probably trust bats less if they suddenly started trying to wash people's cars, not more," Amy said after a moment of thought. "That goes for any animal, really, except maybe monkeys."

"Because monkeys would be nicer to be around if somebody trained them to fling soap suds instead of feces?"

"Exactly."

"Maybe we can try that after we've sent the last of the demon pricks back to hell, because it'll either be that or sign up for Thursday boxercise boot camp. Anyway," Raquel said, "have you found your phone yet?"

The last part sounded exactly like it had in Amy's dream, and much like Raquel's feelings about bats, Amy could not decide whether that was a good thing or not. Either way, she wanted to get this over with so they could go eat and then go home and actually stay home for the rest of the night. With that in mind, she stopped scanning the ceiling for bats and went back to searching the ground for her lost phone. They had covered a lot of area by now, starting around where Amy usually performed the exorcisms and then expanding outward from there when checking the most obvious place had proved fruitless. They still had not yet had any luck, despite having already looked in all the places where it would have made any kind of sense for her to lose it, so now they needed to check all the other places to be thorough.

Now that Amy thought about it, there were still a lot of little flashes of scenes from her dream that had not happened yet. Dear god, she really did not want to have to search the entire building. The place was huge.

It did not help that their old electric torches wouldn't have been satisfactory for task even back when they were new. They definitely were not satisfactory now that they were old and battered and their lenses were all scratched up and their batteries were dying. Unfortunately, demon hunting was the kind of activity that could provide the satisfaction of a job well done but not much in the way of financial rewards, so Amy and Raquel were limited to using whatever equipment they could buy for really cheap, or beg, or borrow, or steal. And stealing was usually not an option either, because neither woman was willing to risk trying to shoplift, both for moral reasons and because getting caught might cause the police to look into all the other much more illegal things they had been doing lately, so they only ever nicked things from the demons they fought.

"If we don't find my phone before then next time we capture a demon to exorcize, I'm going to need to borrow yours," Amy said after they had searched a while longer.

"You really should have the ritual memorized by now."

"It's not the kind of thing I want to risk getting wrong in the heat of the moment, Raquel."

"Just saying we should maybe work on that."

"Yes, I know, but after we find my phone."

After combing the entire factory floor area, they headed upstairs to the offices and meeting rooms, which were somewhat more intact than the more open parts of the building, though not by much. Things were not collapsed or collapsing in that part of the building, but the rickety metal stairs and bent safety railing looked like a tetanus shot waiting to happen.

While searching one of the offices, Amy heard a squeal of moving metal and looked over to see Raquel turning the valve to a pipe fixed to one of the walls. The water or whatever else might have once flowed through it had long ago been cut off somewhere back closer to its source, so nothing happened. It was just as well, because as Raquel turned the valve, the whole length of pipe rattled alarmingly loose in its brackets and against the edges of the holes where it passed through the floor and ceiling. Amy imagined that if turning the valve had allowed anything to start flowing through that pipe then it would have been leaky as hell, which was pretty leaky considering how many demons there seemed to be running around in the world even before what had happened on Halloween.

"No phone there," Raquel announced.

"Why would have it been back there? How could I have possibly put it there without remembering doing something so weird?"

"No idea, but I figured I should check. We'd both feel pretty stupid later if we never looked here but checked everywhere else and this turned out to be where it was all along. Besides, I'm bored, and messing with the plumbing is the closest thing to entertainment this place has to offer."

"Fair point."

"Definitely a fair point," Raquel said mock sagely. Then scowled and added, "Too bad it didn't actually do us any good in this case." She kicked the pipe as if trying to punish it for not coughing up Amy's phone.

The pipe shook in its brackets again, even harder than before, and knocked into the edge of the already sagging acoustic tiling it passed through.

"Oh, shit," Raquel said and hurriedly stumbled backwards, dragging Amy along with her, as the old water damaged piece of tile sagged even further than it already had been, then broke apart and fell out of the ceiling.

The pieces of acoustic tile and something much more solid landed with a crash where the two women had been standing just the moment before.

As the dust settled, Amy and Raquel edged closer. They cast worried glances at the ceiling, but it did not look like any more pieces were about to fall down just yet. The light of their torches revealed a medium sized metal lockbox, the kind somebody might store important items or documents in when they wanted a measure of security but more portability than a traditional safe.

Raquel nudged the box with her toe and said, "Do you think it might be treasure?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean _treasure_ treasure," Raquel said with growing enthusiasm. "Maybe someone hid a whole bunch of stolen gold and died before they could come back and get it, or they got arrested but refused to say where they'd hid the loot and even now, as we speak, they're sitting in jail and dreaming of coming back to reclaim their ill-gotten gains."

"But gold's heavy," Amy said, "heavy enough that if there had been much of any in there then that rotten ceiling tile probably would have collapsed under it ages ago." She reached down, grabbed the box by one of the handles bolted to its sides, and gave an experimental lift. "Definitely doesn't feel like there could be much gold in there," she said.

"Maybe embezzled cash then," Raquel suggested. "That would be even better than gold, really. Easier to make use of without drawing attention." Then she grinned as a thought struck her. "Or maybe it's full of hidden arcane texts, like spell books and shit! Imagine how useful something like that could be in our line of work."

"That'd be dead useful," Amy said, "but it's probably just pornography."

"What, really? Why?"

"Something just like this happened at the bowling alley last year. A water leak made the ceiling tiles in the men's room cave in, bringing a whole file box full of skin mags, a couple of bottles of hand lotion, and a large handled screwdriver with it."

Raquel looked both aghast and amused. "You're joking," she said.

"I wish I was," Amy said, shaking her head. "It almost concussed a little boy when it came down. Turns out one of the local bowling teams had been keeping a collection of porn hidden there so they could all go and have a wank between games. The managed didn't even ban them for it, just said not to do it again." Amy frowned. "There's no way they haven't done it again, is there?"

"Probably not," Raquel agreed, her grin once again back in full force. "But one woman's trashy mags are another woman's treasure, so if this turns out to be someone's porn stash, I'll still consider it a win."

"Fine, but if you want it so badly then you get to be the one who carries it around all night while we look for my phone," Amy said. "It may not be heavy, but it isn't exactly light either."

"Or I could take it out to the car and come back." Raquel picked up the box, turned to leave with it, but then stopped and turned around again to say, "And finding your phone had better not take all night, because I had plans."

"You didn't tell me you had plans. You said we could just Netflix and chill after dinner tonight."

"Netflix and chill totally counts as a plan."

"Oh," Amy said, "well, alright then."

"Although, now that we have this, maybe we should skip the Netflix and instead plan on practicing our lock picking skills and then perusing our newfound porn collection."

"We don't actually know that it's porn mags in there. Porn just seems like the most likely candidate. It could be just about anything."

"Anything but gold," Raquel reminded her.

"Anything within a certain weight range," Amy amended.

"It's like Schrödinger's Box," Raquel said. "Could be ancient spell books in there, or could be pornography, or could be a dead cat. And until we open it up and take a look and collapse its waveform, it's everything at once, spells to summon ancient dead cat porn." Raquel paused, frowning. "Yuck. Forget I said that last part. It sounded funnier in my head. Also, that's not how Schrödinger's Box works. Whatever." She turned and left with her torch and the lockbox tucked under one arm while she fished around in her pocket for her car keys with her other hand.

"Have fun with your dead cat porn spells," Amy shouted after her.

"Oh, believe me, I plan to," Raquel shouted back cheerily.

Amy went back to scanning the office with the beam of her torch, even though there was no reasonable way that she could have lost her phone in there since she had never even set foot in this part of the building until tonight's search. However, like Raquel had said earlier, they needed to be thorough or they might end up feeling stupid later. A fox might have found her phone and carried it in here, since urban foxes were everywhere these days, and foxes were basically like dogs but weirder, so there was no accounting for their behavior.

Or, at least, that was the kind of thing that Mrs. O'Reilly, her fifth year Literature teacher, had said about foxes. In hindsight, that woman didn't seem like a reliable source of information about anything, including literature, so Amy figured that she should probably not treat her as an authority on foxes. With a mental shrug, Amy concluded her sweep of the office and was about to move on to the next one when she heard a distant thump and a shout of, "What the fuck?" from Raquel.

Any ran out of the room and saw Raquel and somebody else fighting over the box at the far end of the hall. Mostly she just saw their legs, because Raquel had dropped her torch, and its beam was not bright enough to illuminate either of the two figures much above the waist. Really, with that kind of lighting, Amy could only recognize Raquel by the shape of her hips in familiar jeans and sneakers. All she could tell about the other person was that they appeared to be somewhat taller and skinnier, and they wearing dark trousers and… a cape?

For a brief moment as Amy ran closer, she had the horrible idea that Callum had tracked them down for revenge for ruining his plans. She tried to remind herself that they had sent that bastard back to the underworld with an ugly ice sculpture pole up his arse, but in the heat of the moment the idea was not as reassuring as it should have been.

As she got closer and shined her light at them, Amy could see that the person struggling with Raquel was a tall pale-skinned and redheaded woman. That in itself did not exactly rule out the possibility of her being Callum, given how demons could body-hop, but as the woman argued with Raquel, she did not really sound like what Amy remembered of Callum's vocal patterns either, so they were probably safe in that regard. The woman was still some kind of demon prick though, because her face shifted to look like a corpse burning from the inside out as she grew angrier at Raquel's continued refusal to surrender the lockbox, so that wasn't good.

"Gimme the spell books, you bitch," the demon snarled.

"Wait," Raquel said. "You mean to say they really are spell books?"

"I heard you say they were. What else could they be?"

"Dead cat porn?"

"You'll have to come up with a better lie than that," the demon said. "Even idiots like you wouldn't drive all the way out here for something you could get for free online." She pulled harder on the box.

"We were looking for my friend's lost phone," Raquel insisted, still not letting go of the box. "You haven't seen it around anywhere by any chance?"

"No."

"Then you're not worth keeping, are you?" Amy said, joining the fight by stepping in close enough to swing for the demon's head with her collapsible tactical baton.

The weapon connected with a loud thud.

However, either the demon had some kind of powers of supernatural sturdiness, or the possessed victim just had an unusually thick skull, because the impact was only enough to make the demon stagger slightly. The demon's resilience was rather impressive, really, because lately Amy had been getting good enough that such a blow should have at least sent the demon to her knees if not into full unconsciousness.

Fortunately, even if Amy's attack was not as effective as she had planned, it provided enough of a distraction to cause the demon to loosen her grip on the lockbox. That in turn gave Raquel the opportunity to stop trying to pull away with all her strength and instead thrust the box up and forward, delivering a second and equally strong blow to the demon's head. Raquel threw in a good hard stomp on the demon's foot, causing her fully release her grip on the lockbox as she howled in pain. 

Even a probably broken foot was not enough to stop the demon for long, and she soon lunged at them again. By then, the fight had carried them the rest of the way down the hall and out to the balcony overlooking the main factory floor below, so when the enraged demon attacked, it was a simple matter for the two friends to dodge out of the way and use the demon's momentum against her.

"Have a nice trip! See you next fall!" Raquel shouted as she and Amy heaved the demon over the rusty safety railing and into the wreckage of abandoned equipment below.

The demon plummeted down and landed with a splash into a giant vat which Amy remembered seeing as being clearly marked with "Danger: Acid" all over it when they had walked past it earlier.

"That's a bit harsh, don't you think?"

"What?" Raquel said, confused. "People say that kind of thing all the time. Or have you somehow never stumbled in public?"

"I meant adding insult to injury as she fell to the grisly fate of being dissolved in a vat of acid," Amy said.

Raquel waved her hand dismissively. "This place has been abandoned for years. When they closed it down, they would have taken all the acid with them when they left," she said as she went back to get her fallen torch. "That kind of stuff is too dangerous to just leave lying around. Probably too valuable, too. It's probably just full of scummy water and mosquito larvae, and maybe more empty beer cans, because those things are everywhere around here."

"Are you sure?" Amy asked when Raquel rejoined her, torch in hand.

"Pretty sure?"

"That doesn't sound very sure?"

"You hit her as hard as you could and it barely rattled her, Amy. I'm sure she'll be fine," Raquel insisted.

"She's not coming up for air," Amy said, peering over the railing to the rippling surface below.

"And if she drowns, then the demon in her is going to jump into a new host," Raquel said as she began following Amy's train of thought.

"And we're the only available hosts nearby," Amy concluded. "Can you get possessed at all, or does being half demon protect you?"

"With our luck, being half demon means that any demon who possesses me would turn into a super powerful demon-and-a-half and be a hundred and fifty percent as demonically prickish as the average demon," Raquel said. Then a look of horror crossed her face. "And if you get possessed," she continued, "I can't exorcise you without turning you into a revenant, and we can't trust Jake to get through the ritual on his own without screwing it up or getting himself killed."

"Even if we wanted to trust Jake with something like that," Amy said, staring into the vat below and trying to calculate how long the caped demon, who Amy had begun to think of as Draculetta, had been down there, "he said he was going off to do some real camping and spend some quality time with his canoe and won't be back for a week. You could always let Tyler in on the truth and get him to do it."

"I really, really don't want to do that," Raquel said. She joined Amy in peering over the railing. "Somebody in my family deserves to stay innocent and clueless, and he's the only one left with that option."

"Then we had better hope that Draculetta down there doesn't drown," Amy said.

They both stared at the calming ripples across the liquid's surface. Even if it was just water, it looked very dark and very scummy.

The demon still did not come up for air. She had been down there for a very long time.

"Shit," both women said in resigned unison. Together, they reluctantly climbed over the safety railing and jumped into the vat below. The dark liquid swallowed them as easily as it had swallowed the demon.

"Ugh, gross," Raquel said a moment later as they broke the surface to breathe. Then, "Do you feel like you're dissolving?"

"Not really."

"Me neither, so this probably isn't acid," Raquel said, sounding relieved. "It's still filthy, though. Good thing I packed a tarp in the boot. I'm tired of hearing Tyler complain about all the things we've done to his upholstery in the past few weeks."

"Let's save the congratulations for good preparedness until after we've prevented either of us from getting possessed," Amy said.

"Right."

They dove under the surface again.

Amy felt around blindly for the sunken demon but couldn't find anything bigger than the omnipresent discarded cans that Raquel had predicted would be there. She kicked her way back up to the surface and filled her lungs. She was preparing to dive down again when Raquel popped up beside her, gasping for air and struggling to support the dead weight of the unconscious demon.

Together, they hauled Draculetta to the edge of the vat and heaved her up and out of it. She was heavier than she looked, which explained why she had sunk like that instead of floating, and her cape added extra drag in the water. The whole process was awkward, and the demon kind of slipped out of their hands and landed with a sullen wet splat on the ground below, but at least the splatting noise was only because of her sodden clothes and not because they had dropped her from high enough to be particularly damaging, and oh god, Amy did not need to be thinking about that mental image right now, no matter how much she missed Suzanne.

"I know we should try to exorcise the demon immediately," Amy said, trying to focus on the present moment and not on memories that would probably stab at her heart until the day she died, "but I haven't had time to get anything to drink since the last exorcism. I'm pretty much still empty."

"Nothing in the description of the ritual actually says that you need to wee on the demon," Raquel said after a moment of contemplating Amy and the bedraggled demon on the ground. "It just says you need to mark her with your scent. In theory, you could maybe just, I don't know, rub your hand around in your armpit and then touch her with it or something like that."

"That might have worked five minutes ago," Amy said, "but right now my armpits and everything else all smells like whatever filth we were just swimming in, not like me." She demonstrated smelling herself and instantly regretted it.

"Well, we can go back to the car to get the rope, and I think I might have left an unopened bottle of Tango in the backseat," Raquel said as she checked Draculetta's pulse and seemed satisfied with what she found. "It won't exactly be cold, but it should get the job done in terms of hydration. Once you have some of that, we can get on with it all." She stood and immediately put her words into action by striding off in the direction they had parked the car.

Amy followed, but then stopped in her tracks after only a few dozen steps. "Wait," she called after Raquel. "One of us should stay with the demon in case she wakes up while we're gone."

But when they turned around to look at their would-be prisoner, she was already gone.

"Shit," they both said in unison again.

* * *

Two more hours of searching failed to turn up Draculetta or any hint of where she might have gone. The lockbox was gone as well. The demon must have doubled back to take it as she escaped.

Those two hours of searching also failed to turn up Amy's phone or any hint of where it might have gone. They had tried calling the phone to see if they could hear it ringing so many times that the battery in Raquel's phone had gone dead and the batteries in their torches were about to do the same. The blubs had dimmed to the point of giving barely enough light to keep them from walking into walls, leaving them with little choice but to give up for the night.

It was beyond getting late and into getting early, and Amy and Raquel were both tired and hungry, not to mention still covered in the stinking residue from their swim in the vat. They unanimously decided that they liked the idea of going home for food and a shower more than they disliked the idea of abandoning their search.

They were fumbling their way through the near darkness back to the car when a shape separated itself from the deeper shadows.

"Well, don't the two of you look like a couple of drowned rats," a familiar voice said. The voice did not belong to Draculetta .

Amy found herself shouting, "Suzanne!" and throwing herself forward to embrace her thought-dead (twice over, even!) roommate before she even consciously registered that, yes, the person in front of them could only be Suzanne. "Oh god, Suzanne, Jake said your head had come off and I shouldn't look! I should have checked for myself. I would have known you weren't dead."

"My head did come off," Suzanne laughed, embracing Amy right back, "but apparently I take a lot of killing before I stay dead. God, Amy, it's great to see you, even if it's not so great to smell you." Suzanne loosened her embrace and held Amy out at arm's length, reluctant to completely let go of her even though she clearly did not want her directly under her nose while smelling like whatever it was. "What on earth have the two of you been doing?" She stepped into what little light their torches were still providing and showed off the jagged, still healing scar around her neck.

"Oh," Amy answered, still trying to believe what she was seeing and feeling, "just a little nighttime swim in maybe or maybe not acid in an attempt to keep from creating a super demon or another revenant. You know, the usual."

"And how did that go?"

"We didn't get the best possible outcome, but not the worst either," Raquel said from a few steps back, keeping her distance. "We still haven't found what we set out for in the first place."

"We found you, though, or you found us, and that's even better," Amy added. She leaned in up on tiptoes and kissed Suzanne before she could think better of it.

Suzanne showed no inclination toward pulling away even if Amy could feel Suzanne's nose wrinkle where hers pressed against it.

"I'll just, um, I'll just go over here and keep watch in case Draculetta decides to come back," Raquel muttered behind Amy.

That caused Suzanne to break the kiss, much to Amy's disappointment even as she also felt guilty for excluding Raquel. "Who is Draculetta?" Suzanne asked.

"The demon prick who jumped me and stole my treasure box of dead cat porn."

"What?"

"I'd tell you that it makes more sense in context," Amy said, "but I'm not sure if it does, just like most of the things in our lives these days."

"So for now," Raquel said, "let's just leave it at the fact that there's a demon in a cape possibly lurking around here somewhere or possibly already trying to put as much distance between her and us as possible."

"You mean a batshit crazy readhead, about this tall," Suzanne said, holding her hand at roughly the height that Amy remembered the demon being, "who looks like she's running around in a Halloween costume two weeks into November?"

"Yeah, that's the one."

"She's the one I followed to get here but then lost her in this place," Suzanne said. "I'd have come forward and rejoined you sooner, but she tried to recruit me and didn't take it well when I refused. I don't know what she's planning, but anything a demon is planning can't be good, and I intend to stop it. I can take you to her hideout in case she's gone back there."

"Awesome," Raquel said, "let's go kick some demon arse."

"After a shower," Amy added.

"Yeah," Raquel agreed, "definitely after a shower."

Rather than try to argue, Suzanne looked relieved.

* * *

Two showers, then a third after Suzanne realized Amy had gotten some of the stink on her while they were hugging, some snacks, and a long drive out into the countryside later, the three reunited friends gathered outside of a large creepy looking mansion.

"Why do demons always seem to own big creepy looking homes?" Amy complained.

"I've done some digging on this demon," Suzanne said, "and this place is just a rental."

"Do you think she picked this place because it's creepy looking?" Raquel mused. "Or, do you think it became creepy looking when a demon started renting it?"

"I don't know," Amy said. "Guess we'll have to exorcise her and see if the place starts looking friendlier or not."

"Works for me," Suzanne said.

They snuck into the mansion together, which was not as difficult as the massive stone wall around the place would imply, because someone had left solid wooden doors of the gate open.

They split up once they were inside. That way, if Draculetta or any of her minions caught Suzanne or caught Amy and Raquel but did not catch all of them, then the demons would not know that the three of them had joined forces. Amy and Raquel decided to check the upper floors to see if they could find anything that might explain what Draculetta was up to, while Suzanne checked the ground floor for the same thing.

"And I'll also check the wine cellar if I can find it," Suzanne added before they went their separate ways. "The rental company website said that it can only be accessed by a hidden door like out of some old movie or adventure novel. They described the place as, and I quote, 'huge, great for tying people up, practically a dungeon, so big that you could wall someone up in there and the owners probably wouldn't notice the reduction in square footage.' I want to see it in person."

Amy and Raquel both gave her an incredulous look.

"What?" Suzanne said, clearly feeling defensive. "I just want to see if it's as much like a bondage dungeon as it sounds like they're trying to say without actually saying that it's a bondage dungeon, and the secret door sounds kind of cool all on its own."

"No, no, that's all fine, Suzanne." Raquel said. "I'm just thinking that it sounds like you're either going to find the most bondage-y not so secret bondage dungeon ever, in which case yay for you, or whoever is writing the blurbs for that website is as demonic as Draculetta and they should be the next person we subject to exorcism and/or arse pole because they sound like they genuinely want to convince some renter that reenacting the Cask of Amontillado is a good idea."

"I was just thinking that I never realized you were into bondage," Amy said. "And even if you had been before, I would have thought what happened at the cabin and everything after might have kind of ruined it for you."

"I just wanted to see if the place was as blatantly kinky as the website made it sound," Suzanne said. "I wasn't looking for someone to tie me up and treat me mean."

"Oh."

"Wait," Suzanne said, "are you disappointed?"

"Of course not!" Or at least, not much, but Amy was not going to say that part out loud.

They went their separate ways with promises to meet back up again in fifteen minutes.

The upstairs mostly consisted of the kinds of rooms that Amy imagined were typical of rental mansions, as much as anything as ridiculously out of her personal experience as a rental mansion could ever possibly be typical. All of the rooms were somehow super posh and expensive looking while also seeming to lack any sense of personality, like a set put together for a magazine shoot instead of a place someone was expected to make use of in real life.

Then she and Raquel found the office. That was where things got interesting, not because the furniture was any different in style, but because of the things that were left sitting on the desk.

"That bitch," Amy exclaimed. "I knew Draculetta was lying when she said she hadn't seen my phone!" 

"And she picked the lock on the lock box. You were right, it's full of porn," Raquel said, peering into the open lid and then reaching inside. "Looks like a whole lot of lesbian porn. I bet that was disappointing if she had been expecting it to be anything important like spell books."

"Is it the kind of lesbian porn that has lesbians but is made for blokes? Or is it the good kind?" Amy asked as she deleted the dozens of missed call notifications that had resulted from their previous attempts at finding the phone.

"Looks like a little of both," Raquel said. "You can take a look through, if you want. I'm going to see if this office has any other interesting and possibly more useful goodies to offer." Raquel turned away from the box to open the filing cabinet behind the desk, but Amy was sure that she caught a glimpse of her surreptitiously slipping a magazine into her jacket.

"Might as well, since it's here," Amy said as she finished with her phone and put it away. She peered into the box. She had only had time to flip through the first couple of magazines when she heard Raquel give a long, low whistle.

"Jackpot," Raquel said. She pulled a handful of folders out of the filing cabinet and spread them across the desk for Amy to see. "Looks like the demon pricks are trying to organize again but didn't realize that keeping tidy written lists of your minions might be used against them. This might be all the rest of the escaped demons from Halloween."

"That's fantastic," Amy exclaimed. "If it is and we work fast, we could have this mess cleaned up by the end of the week and everything can go back to normal!" Seeing a flash of disappointment speed across Raquel's face before being hidden just as quickly, Amy hastened to add, "Or, at least, everything can go back to as normal as hunting down all the other demons who have been around for ages one at a time can ever be. You know, our new normal."

"Our new normal," Raquel agreed, looking relieved. She gathered up the files and put them into her jacket.

Amy very carefully ignored the crinkling noise the magazine already in there made as the files joined it.

Together, they did a quick search of the rest of the office, but nothing else seemed as significant as the files Raquel had found. Apparently the demons were still in the planning stages and had not yet settled on an actual evil plan yet. They did, however, find some kind of small remote control unit in the desk drawer. It was not labeled with anything to indicate its function and pushing some of the buttons at random did not yield any immediately visible results. Amy pocketed it, just in case it turned out to be the way into that dungeon Suzanne was looking for or something equally important.

"Let's go see if Suzanne had as good luck as we did," Raquel said, checking the time once they had finished searching.

At first they did not see Suzanne when they returned to the agreed upon meeting spot, but a quiet, "Psst, over here," revealed her to be waiting for them in the shadows under the main grand staircase. "It's about time you got here," she said, glancing around. "I've had to dodge that demon in the cape twice, so let's get out of here quick."

"While we do," Raquel said, reaching into her jacket and passing the files to Suzanne, "how would like to hear about our new normal?"

Suzanne opened the top folder, saw the contents, and raised a questioning eyebrow. "Lesbian porn?"

"Um, sorry, this jacket wasn't exactly designed for organized information storage and things can get mixed up. Under that."

"But lesbian porn could be the new normal too," Amy added sweetly as they headed for the door.

Suzanne gave Amy an unreadable look, then began paging through the files as she walked out the door without answering.

Amy and Raquel followed, Amy frowning as she went.

Once the trio exited the mansion, they encountered a slight hitch in their simple escape plan.

While they had been inside, someone had closed and locked the gate. The gate required a security code to activate it, even from inside, and the walls looked far too high to climb.

"Well, shit," Raquel said, "now what do we do? I don't see any other exits in the wall."

"Don't worry," Amy said, "I've got this." With a flourish, she produced the remote she had stolen only a few minutes earlier. "I must have accidentally closed the gate with this when I first found it. Opening it again should be just as easy." She pushed the buttons in what she thought was the sequence she had done earlier.

Nothing happened.

She tried a few other combinations in case she had misremembered the original order.

Nothing happened.

She tried about a dozen more combinations, which felt like it was starting to get a little ridiculous, because the remote control only had four buttons, and she was pretty sure that she hadn't pressed any button more than once when she was first playing with it.

Nothing happened.

She tried mashing all the buttons at the same time.

Nothing happened.

Amy sighed and gave up.

"Or I guess it's not so easy," Raquel said. "But there's a big old garage over there."

"It's a carriage house," Suzanne said.

"Whatever it is, we can sneak in there. If Draculetta in bringing new demons into her group, chances are that not everyone has the code memorized yet, and someone might have left a cheat sheet for it lying around in a parked car or pinned to the doorframe or something."

"Sounds good to me," Amy said.

They were just beginning to walk away from the gate when they heard it start opening behind them.

"Maybe one of the codes I used was the right one and the machinery is slow?" Amy wondered aloud.

"Or maybe someone is coming from the other side," Raquel said. She glanced around frantically until her eyes fell on the clump of decorative topiary bushes near the wall. The bushes were too small to even look like they might be helpful in an attempt to climb over the wall, but they might be big enough to hide a few people. "Quick, in there," Raquel said, pointing and then putting words into action.

Amy dove in after her.

"Or, we could not," Suzanne said, staying right where she was, out in plain sight of whoever was approaching.

The gate finished opening and a van drove in.

"What are you doing?" Amy hissed at Suzanne from her hiding place. She half hoped that Suzanne was about to go all ninja on whoever was coming so that the three of them could escape, but she knew that had never been Suzanne's style. Even taking out that one demon flunky when they tried to have Suzanne kill Amy had required the element of surprise more than anything else. Suzanne's usual method of conflict resolution involved talking people into getting drunk with her until they decided they were her friends.

"What does it look like?" Suzanne asked with a smirk. "I'm betraying your trust."

The van pulled to a stop in front of her, and Draculetta and two other demons, who weren't bothering to their burning selves from anyone capable of seeing them, got out of it.

"It's about time you lot got here," Suzanne said. "Grab those idiots in the bushes over there and get inside. Also, if I find out that any of you has a cheat sheet for the gate code lying around anywhere, I'm going to make you all regret it."

The demons looked nervously at each other ass they shuffled forward to do Suzanne's bidding. Whether it was because they were reluctant to fight Amy and Raquel after hearing of the women's growing list of exploits or because one or more of them really did have a cheat sheet somewhere or both was anyone's guess.

Raquel managed to incapacitate one of the demons in short order, but Amy was in too much shock to put up as much of a fight as she should have.

"You're not Suzanne," she said as the other of the still nameless demons wrestled her into a secure grip. "You must be a demon possessing her."

"Demons can't possess revenants," Suzanne said as she helped Draculetta subdue and disarm Raquel. "If they could, they'd be doing it for shits and giggles at every opportunity. Can you imagine the havoc a demon could wreak while in a body so difficult to permanently kill? It would be glorious." She ignored Raquel's long string of creatively profane threats of what she intended to do the Suzanne and the demons once she got free.

Draculetta seemed a little bit less blasé about threats of violence against her person after what Raquel had previously done to her foot, so she shoved a wad of cloth into Raquel's mouth to shut her up. 

"Then you're a demon with shapeshifter powers or something," Amy insisted. "Suzanne would never do this to me. To us, I mean."

"That's what you think," Suzanne or whatever was wearing her face said. She took Amy's collapsible baton and searched her for other weapons.

"That's what I know," Amy said.

"Whatever," Probably-not-Suzanne said. "And I'm taking this back," she added, reaching into Amy's pocket and removing the remote unit. "I paid a lot of money for a place with a hot tub, and I'm not letting you run off with the control for it. Or more specifically, I'm not letting anyone forget to get it back from you before they wall you up in the basement, because seriously, it was like the rental company wanted somebody to hide a body or two down there."

"Yeah," Amy said, "Suzanne already told us. Also, she never liked hot tubs, always said they made her feel like she was cooking herself into soup."

Definitely-not-Suzanne just shrugged unconcernedly and, with the help of Draculetta and the other still conscious demon, pushed Amy and Raquel back towards the mansion.

* * *

The entrance to the hidden wine cellar was in the library. Draculetta pushed a switch camouflaged as a knothole in the wood of one of the larger bookcases in the room, causing it to swing open and reveal… a group of smaller bookcases. Pushing another knothole switch caused one of those bookcases to swing open and reveal a surprisingly well-lit staircase heading deep underground.

Raquel tried to say something around the wad of cloth still in her mouth, which she had been trying to force out with her tongue but Draculetta kept pushing back in whenever she noticed. The words were nigh unintelligible, but Amy was pretty sure that she had said, "Now that's just overkill."

"Yeah, definitely overkill," Amy agreed.

"Some people just don't appreciate the finer things in life," Draculetta complained. She gave an annoyed swish of her cape for emphasis.

"Okay," Raquel said, having finally managed to spit out the cloth from her mouth while Draculetta was distracted by being a demonic drama-llama, "I have to ask. What's with the cape? Have you had so little experience with the human world that you don't know you were supposed to change out of your Halloween costume once Halloween was over, or what?"

"This isn't what this body was wearing when I possessed it," Draculetta said haughtily. "She was dressed as a mermaid and not even a good one. The tail was made out of a vinyl tablecloth and held together with staples and cellotape, and the wig was an orange cheerleader's pompom. She probably threw the costume together in five minutes, no effort or class at all. Whereas, _I_ have used my fabulous dress sense to bring some panache to this pathetic sack of meat which its original owner clearly never came close to having."

"So you're saying capes are cool?" Amy ventured. "Because they aren't. Not even Gerard Butler could make a cape look cool. Nobody can."

"Wait," Raquel said. "Are you the real Dracula?"

Draculetta frowned in confusion. "Who is Dracula?"

"Shut it, the lot of you," Not-Suzanne said, scowling at everyone but mostly at Draculetta. "I can understand the humans wanting to stall for time, but you have a schedule to keep just as much as I do, so let's get this over with."

"Fine," Draculetta muttered, swishing her cape again before heading down the stairs.

Not-Suzanne and the other demon, who had remained silent the whole time but was beginning to look as if she was beginning to regret throwing her lot in with this group, frog-marched Amy and Raquel down the stairs to a truly enormous wine cellar which was everything that Suzanne had described to them and more. Stone columns supported high vaulted ceilings, and the countless empty wine racks which occupied roughly half of the floor area did more to emphasize how much of the cavernous space was still empty than make it seem like much of any space had been filled. The half of the cellar without the wine racks was mostly empty aside from the aforementioned support columns and a few piles of furniture and other no doubt expensive knickknacks stored haphazardly in the corners.

Sitting gagged, stripped down to her underwear, and tied to a support column in a dark corner near one of the piles of junk, was Suzanne.

"Suzanne," Amy shouted. She struggled out of the demon's grip and ran to her bound friend.

Raquel struggled free as well but let the two roommates have their space.

"Ah," Not-Suzanne said, smirking maliciously, "but is that the real Suzanne or am I?"

"You're really going to try to pull that?" Raquel said.

"This is the real Suzanne and you're the impostor," Amy said with complete conviction as she began to untie Suzanne.

"Obviously," Raquel said, nodding in agreement, "and you probably made a crucial mistake when you stole Suzanne's clothes but not her underwear. I bet Amy was there the day Suzanne bought that bra and panty set or gave it to her for her birthday or something. Dead giveaway to those in the know."

"Actually I've never set eyes on this underwear before today," Amy said. "It looks good on you, though, very cute," she told Suzanne as she undid the first of the knots holding her in place.

Suzanne, still gagged, had to settle for giving Amy a fondly exasperated eye-roll in reply.

Unfortunately, the one place the demons seemed to be competent was in the restraint methods they had used on Suzanne, having tied her tightly in place with no less than three ropes, so Amy still had a ways to go before she got Suzanne free.

"You can't act like it's so obvious when I had you fooled before," Not-Suzanne insisted, still sounding far too smug.

"You had us fooled for, like, five minutes, during which you barely talked," Amy said, still mostly focused on untying Suzanne.

"Also," Raquel added, "by saying you had us fooled, you just admitted you aren't the real Suzanne."

Not-Suzanne's smirk turned to a scowl. "If that's how you're going to be, then sod this," she said. "I _was_ going to torture all of you and get a few days or weeks of enjoyment from your begging and screaming. But you're being so annoying that I think I'll just go for instant gratification and kill you now." She snapped her fingers. "Get them," she told the other demons.

"Um, about that," Draculetta said, looking around and realizing that the quiet demon had sneaked away while everyone else was distracted, leaving Draculetta as Not-Suzanne's only remaining hench-demon.

"We don't need that coward to take these idiots. Now, get them," Not-Suzanne shouted. She reached out, slapped a hand against a taxidermy grizzly bear that was among the many things being stored in the cellar, and promptly turned into an identical looking but very much alive copy of the bear, tearing out of her (or rather, Suzanne's) clothing like it was paper.

"Right," Draculetta muttered, and began advancing toward the trio alongside the bear.

"You totally called it on the shapeshifting powers thing," Raquel as she took a few steps back from the two demons while also moving sideways to put herself between them and Amy and the still tied up Suzanne.

"I kinda wish I hadn't," Amy said. "Or at least I wish she wasn't so good at it." Temporarily giving up on the remaining too-tight knots holding Suzanne in place, she grabbed a mismatched pair of large metal candlesticks from the junk pile next to them and stood to put herself between the demons and Suzanne. She handed one of the candlesticks to Raquel. "Still, I think we can take her. I read that if a bear attacks you, you just need to make yourself look bigger and more aggressive than it is." With her free hand, she unzipped her jacket so that it hung open and then flapped her arms around and shouted, "Rarrr!" at the bear.

Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear looked unimpressed.

"Even if that works on real bears, which I doubt," Raquel said, swinging the candlestick around in front of her both to get a feel for the weight and balance of it and to try to ward off their attackers, "I don't think a demon pretending to be a bear is going to fall for anti-bear psychology tricks, especially not if you explain them out loud where the demon bear can hear you."

Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear nodded in agreement and snarled at them.

"Oh, right," Amy said. However, instead of backing down, she took on a look of greater determination, tightened her grip on her candlestick, and said, "Well, we can still give her one hell of a sore head." With her free hand, she reached back into the junk pile and grabbed the first thing she could pull free from the mess, which turned out to be a life-sized carved wooden fox. She heaved it at the bear as best she could onehanded, but due to the object's size and weight, it fell short of its mark and clattered to the floor without having so much as brushed the bear's nose in passing.

Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear gave an unimpressed snort and swiped it out of her path with one giant paw, not seeming to care that she knocked it into Draculetta, who gave a pained yelp and stumbled, clutching her leg where the wooden fox had made impact.

Amy and Raquel only needed a glance to communicate their intent to each other. Recognizing an opening when they saw one, they moved in tandem to take out Draculetta as she was injured and distracted. They dodged around Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear 's flailing claws, and they took Draculetta out of the fight with a few quick blows from their candlesticks. It was a minor victory, seeing as how they still needed to face an angry bear-shaped demon. However, needing to face an angry bear demon was better than needing to face an angry bear-shaped demon and a regular demon at the same time.

While Raquel circled the bear cautiously, looking for an opening to attack, Amy scanned the nearby junk pile for anything of a better size to throw, but everything left was either too big and awkward, like the marble birdbath, or too light and flimsy looking, like the small wicker basket filled with faded silk flowers. Her candlestick would have made a good projectile, but she did not want to throw away her only weapon.

Unfortunately, Amy became so focused on trying to find something to throw at the bear that she did not see the bear lunging at her.

The bear knocked Amy down as easily as she had swatted aside the wooden fox. The only saving grace was that Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear seemed to be still getting used to her new shape and had not managed to work much claw action into the blow. Even without the claws, Amy was going to have some wicked bruises if she survived the next few minutes, which seemed doubtful considering the way that Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear loomed over her, seeming to savor Amy's fear before going in for the kill.

"Get away from her, you bitch," Raquel shouted, and suddenly the marble birdbath sped through the air and slammed into Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear, even though Raquel had not been standing anywhere near the birdbath when it began its flight. The force of the blow sent Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear stumbling into a huge, lumpy object covered by a canvas drop cloth, which, judging by the sound it made as it collapsed under her, had been a chandelier. Before Not-Suzanne-Now-A-Bear could untangle herself from the mess and begin attacking again, Raquel ran forward and knocked her into unconsciousness with her candlestick.

The bear let out a groaning sigh and shifted back into human form, this time looking like a very pale redhead who could have been Draculetta's sister.

"Did you like that?" Raquel said with a grin as she helped Amy to her feet. "Usually you hear about chandeliers getting dropped on people, not the other way around."

Together they went to finish untying Suzanne.

"What the hell was that?" Amy demanded of Raquel, grateful but still shaken enough by the ordeal that tact was a little beyond her at the moment.

"You mean besides me being awesome?" Raquel said. "Although maybe I should have said, 'Get away from, her you sow,' since, you know, a female bear is called a sow?" She shrugged. "That wouldn't have been as much like Ripley from Aliens, though," she added with a grin, before focusing on the stubborn knot again.

"She meant the thing with the flying birdbath," Suzanne said as soon as Amy pulled the gag out of her mouth.

"Oh, right, that," Raquel said. "I kind of figured since I got some of my dad's demon powers then maybe I got all of them, so I've been doing a little practicing and experimenting in private, and _ta-da_!"

"So that time I came back from the loo and there were suddenly cheese puffs all over my room? You said the packet had been glued shut too well," Amy said, beginning to relax a little bit as both Draculetta and Not-Suzanne remained well and truly unconscious, "and that you had to pull and pull but it still wouldn't open until suddenly the whole thing split apart and launched the cheese puffs everywhere. That was really you practicing your telekinesis, wasn't it?" Amy's hands shook a little bit, but that was just the leftover adrenaline from the fight, which she was getting more and more used to as she and Raquel continued to hunt down demons, and she was still able to untie the last of the knots holding Suzanne to the pillar. Her heartrate was already almost back down to normal. She would be sore tomorrow, though. Hell, she was already sore.

"Um, no, _that_ was exactly what I said it was," Raquel said, briefly ducking her head with embarrassment. "Mostly I practice flinging pillows and stuff when Tyler isn't home. There's less cleanup that way than if I used food. Usually. Here, watch this." She stared hard at the pile of assorted ropes they had just taken off of Suzanne and sent half of them to land on top of Not-Suzanne and then sent the remaining ropes to land on Draculetta. "I'm not good enough to tie them up with my powers. That would be really cool," she said regretfully.

"You're still amazing," Amy insisted.

Raquel 's expression brightened at the praise. "I know, right?" She helped Amy pull Suzanne to her feet and then stepped back, held one hand up, and, once Amy and Suzanne had finished hugging each other, said, "Telekinetic high-five!"

Amy raised a hand to mirror Raquel and promptly felt a slap against one of her breasts. "Ow," she said more on principal than from pain, though it wasn't exactly comfortable.

"Shit! Sorry," Raquel exclaimed.

"You hit me right in the tit. Again. What is it with you and my tits?" Amy asked a lot more fondly than she would have done a few weeks earlier.

"Freudian Nip Slip?" Suzanne suggested, looking between the other two women.

"Maybe just a little bit," Raquel said, and then she hurried over to Draculetta and began tying her up. "That reminds me," she called over her shoulder to Amy. "You need to tell Suzanne about the new normal."

"The new normal is lesbian porn," Amy blurted at Suzanne's fond but questioning look. "Um, I mean, this conversation would be easier if our first attempt at having it had been with you instead of the demon pretending to be you. Speaking of which…" She went back too Not-Suzanne and began to tie her up with the ropes Raquel had dropped on her.

Suzanne found a golf club in one of the other junk piles and stood guard while Amy worked, ready to swing if Not-Suzanne showed any signs of waking up.

"I am _so_ glad she turned back into a human," Amy muttered. "I didn't want to see the kinds of results I would have gotten if I'd had to Google 'how to hogtie a bear.'"

* * *

Later, after Raquel and Suzanne absented them from the scene and Amy performed the dual exorcisms (which worked perfectly well using sweat instead of wee, a fact which would make future exorcisms much more pleasant for everyone but the demons), the three women headed back to their car, having left the newly freed redheads, who were indeed sisters, to figure out what to do with the rented mansion they suddenly found themselves in possession of. No pun intended, except on Raquel's part.

"So, about the new normal," Amy said, walking up between Raquel and Suzanne and throwing an arm around each of their shoulders. "The lesbian porn was purely metaphorical, honest."

"Does it have to be?" Suzanne asked. "Dying let me know I need to live my life to the fullest while I can, so I'd be down for non-metaphorical lesbian porn if you are."

That brought Amy up short. "Really?" she squeaked half happy and half terrified.

"I know what this really means," Raquel said. "We're going to have to buy Suzanne a set of animal pajamas."

Amy laughed. Maybe the new normal would need some more negotiation to fully figure it out, but with Suzanne and Raquel by her side, she was sure that it was going to be great.

**The End**


End file.
